Bottlemania
Elizabeth Royte
'Elizabeth Royte [is] a savvy US journalist with an elegant turn of phrase ... she also has the knack of bringing a weighty subject to life, and often in a humorous way.'
Roy Williams (The Weekend Australian)'Royte, an American journalist … deserves praise for delving into the dark consequences of our consumption habits. In Bottlemania she turns her attention to the commodification of water and its political, cultural, moral and environmental implications.'
Kitty Hauser (Australian Literary Review)‘As impressive as Royte's doggedness and investigative skill is the care she takes with language. In a book where facts and figures are so plentiful and ominous, felicitous phrasing can work like the proverbial spoonful of sugar.’
(Washington Post)Bottlemania is an incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialisation of our most basic human need: drinking water.
Having already surpassed milk and beer, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the United States. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we’re hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we’re drinking and why.
In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles?
A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out money to quench their daily thirst.
'Royte deserves credit for her tenacity and well-balanced approach … Lively investigative journalism.'
(Kirkus Reviews)'With journalistic zeal, Royte ... documents the environmental impact of discarded plastic bottles, the carbon footprint of water shipped long distances and health concerns around the leaching of plastic compounds from bottles ... This portrait of the science, commerce and politics of potable water is an entertaining and eye-opening narrative.'
(Publishers Weekly)Elizabeth Royte
Author photo
Elizabeth Royte has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and the New Yorker. She is the author of Garbage Land and The Tapir’s Morning Bath.
Extent: 288pp
Size: 234mm x 153mm
ISBN (13): 9781921372131
RRP: $32.95
Pub date: July 2008
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